I’d like to share a passage from Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm with you. This passage was brought to my attention by my lovely wife. She’s a better reader than me for several reasons. One reason is that I’ve resigned myself to primarily reading books with pictures in them, but that’s a relatively new thing. The reason that impresses me the most is that she’s well-read in two languages. Her decision to read The Ice Storm follows in the foot steps of Li Ang, another Chinese genius who reads Western literature. You may remember than Li Ang directed the film adaptation of the book. It featured the acting talents of Sigourney Weaver and does not resemble that abomination Avatar. My wife’s been reading this book for the past few days and keeps telling me that she finally understands the American Suburbs and why I’m fucked up.

Anyway, here’s the passage:

Sure, Paul had tried DC Comics. He had read Batman and Justice League of America, and he had followed some of the other Marvel titles too: Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, and X-Men and especially those titles that were F.F. spin-offs, The Silver Surfer and The Sub-Mariner. He had tried them all. He had ranged far and wide. But he kept coming back to the F.F. Batman was cool: his skills were not supernatural. He was just smart and rich. Superman was a moral force. The Hulk had hubris. Silver Surfer was definitely created by a mind on psychedelics. Thor was the comic you read if you wanted to work for one of those touring Renaissance festivals, if you wanted to wear a shirt that was called a blouse.

So why the Fantastic Four? First of all, Paul couldn’t shake the uncanny coincidence that his father had the same first name as Benjamin Grimm, the Thing. When he was younger, he actually thought of his father as the Thing: chunky, homely, self-pitying. When Paul was a kid, his dad raged around his house like a pachyderm taking down underbrush. His father would find a damp towel clumped on the bathroom floor and sprint to Paul’s room to accuse him.His father would lay in wait for the tiniest noise, the scantest footfall, and then he would howl from the bottom of the stairs. But his dad was always coming around to apologize, too. He couldn’t terrorize with real commitment. He was like the Thing. He hated the world, hated mankind, but loved people, loved kids and dogs.

And his mother was the Invisible Girl. Although, on the other hand, sometimes she was like Crystal, the Elemental, the prophetess, a seer. And sometimes his dad was Reed Richards, the elastic scientist. And sometimes Paul himself was Be Grimm, and sometimes he was Peter Parker, a.k.a. the Spider-Man. These models never worked exactly. Still, the F.F., with all their mistakes and allegiances, their infighting and dependability, told some true tale about family. When Paul started reading these books, the corny melodram of New Canaan lost its sting.

The pictures are from our tree. If you want to look at more of our ornaments, I suggest you click here and enjoy some of the ways the Christmas spirit manifested in our apartment. If you want to make us an ornament, that would be pretty cool.